>
> Where are the WMD's? You might find them in this article.
>
> Where the WMDs Went
> By Jamie Glazov
> FrontPageMagazine.com | November 16, 2005
>
> www.frontpagemag.com . . .
>
> Frontpage InterviewÂ’s guest today is Bill Tierney, a former military
> intelligence officer and Arabic speaker who worked at Guantanamo Bay in
> 2002 and as a counter-infiltration operator in Baghdad in 2004. He was
> also an inspector (1996-1998) for the United Nations Special Commission
> (UNSCOM) for overseeing the elimination of weapons of mass destruction
> and ballistic missiles in Iraq. He worked on the most intrusive
> inspections during this period and either participated in or planned
> inspections that led to four of the seventeen resolutions against Iraq.
>
> FP: Mr. Tierney, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
>
> Tierney: Thanks for the opportunity.
>
> FP: With the Democrats now so viciously and hypocritically attacking
> Bush about WMDs, IÂ’d like to discuss your own knowledge and expertise on
> this issue in connection to Iraq. You have always held that Iraq had
> weapons of mass destruction. Why? Can you discuss some actual finds?
>
> Tierney: It was probably on my second inspection that I realized the
> Iraqis had no intention of ever cooperating. They had very successfully
> turned The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections during
> the eighties into tea parties, and had expected UNSCOM to turn out the
> same way. However, there was one fundamental difference between IAEA and
> UNSCOM that the Iraqis did not account for. There was a disincentive in
> IAEA inspections to be aggressive and intrusive, since the same
> standards could then be applied to the members states of the inspectors.
> IAEA had to consider the continued cooperation of all the member states.
> UNSCOM, however, was focused on enforcing and verifying one specific
> Security Council Resolution, 687, and the level of intrusiveness would
> depend on the cooperation from Iraq.
>
> I came into the inspection program as an interrogator and Arabic
> linguist, so I crossed over various fields and spotted various deception
> techniques that may not have been noticed in only one field, such as
> chemical or biological. For instance, the Iraqis would ask in very
> reasonable tones that questionable documents be set aside until the end
> of the day, when a discussion would determine what was truly of interest
> to UNSCOM. The chief inspector, not wanting to appear like a
> knuckle-dragging ogre, would agree. Instead of setting the documents on
> a table in a stack, the Iraqis would set them side to side, filling the
> entire table top, and would place the most explosive documents on the
> edge of the table. At some point they would flood the room with people,
> and in the confusion abscond with the revealing documents.
>
> This occurred at Tuwaitha Atomic Research Facility in 1996. A car tried
> to blow through an UNSCOM vehicle checkpoint at the gate. The car had a
> stack of documents about two feet high in the back seat. In the middle
> of the stack, I found a document with a Revolutionary Command Council
> letterhead that discussed Atomic projects with four number designations
> that were previously unknown. The Iraqis were extremely concerned. I
> turned the document over to the chief inspector, who then fell for the
> Iraqis’ “reasonable request” to lay it out on a table for later
> discussion. The Iraqis later flooded the room, and the document
> disappeared. Score one for the Iraqis.
>
> On finds, the key word here is “find.” UNSCOM could pursue a lead and
> approach an inspection target from various angles to cut off an escape
> route, but at some point, the Iraqis would hold up their guns and keep
> us out.
>
> A good example of this was the inspection of the 2nd Armored Battalion
> of the Special Republican Guards in June 1997. We came in from three
> directions, because we knew the Iraqis had an operational center that
> tracked our movement and issued warnings. The vehicle I was in arrived
> at the gate first. There were two guards when we arrived, and over
> twenty within a minute, all extremely nervous.
>
> The Iraqis had stopped the third group of our inspection team before it
> could close off the back of the installation. A few minutes later, a
> soldier came from inside the installation, and all the other guards
> gathered around him. He said something, there was a big laugh, and all
> the guards relaxed. A few moments later there was a radio call from the
> team that had been stopped short. They could hear truck engines through
> the tall (10”) grass in that area. When we were finally allowed in, our
> team went to the back gate. The Iraqis claimed the gate hadnÂ’t been
> opened in months, but there was freshly ground rust at the gate hinges.
> There was a photo from overhead showing tractor trailers with missiles
> in the trailers leaving the facility.
>
> When pressed, Tariq Aziz criticized the inspectors for not knowing the
> difference between a missile and a concrete guard tower. He never
> produced the guard towers for verification. It was during this period
> that Tariq Aziz pulled out his “no smoking gun” line. Tariq very
> cleverly changed the meaning of this phrase. The smoking gun refers to
> an indicator of what you are really looking for - the bullet. Tariq
> changed the meaning so smoking gun referred to the bullet, in this case
> the WMD, knowing that as long as there were armed guards between us and
> the weapons, we would never be able to “find,” as in “put our hands on,”
> the weapons of mass destruction. The western press mindlessly took this
> up and became the IraqisÂ’ tool. I will let the reader decide whether
> this inspection constitutes a smoking gun.
>
> FP: So can you tell us about some other “smoking guns”?
>
> Tierney: Sure. Another smoking gun was the inspection of the 2nd
> Infantry Battalion of the Special Republican Guards. After verifying
> source information related to biological weapons formerly stored at the
> National War College, we learned at another site that the unit
> responsible for guarding the biological weapons was stationed near the
> airport. We immediately dashed over there before the Iraqis could react,
> and forced them to lock us out. One of our vehicles took an elevated
> position where they could look inside the installation and see the
> Iraqis loading specialized containers on to trucks that matched the
> source description for the biological weapons containers. The Iraqis
> claimed that we had inspected the facilities a year earlier, so we
> didnÂ’t need to inspect it again.
>
> Another smoking gun was the inspection of Jabal Makhul Presidential
> Site. In June/July 1997 we inspected the 4th Special Republican Guards
> Battalion in Bayji, north of Tikrit. This unit had been photographed
> taking equipment for the Electro-magnetic Isotope Separation (EMIS)
> method of uranium enrichment away from inspectors. The Iraqis were
> extremely nervous as this site, and hid any information on personnel who
> may have been involved with moving the equipment. This was also the site
> where the Iraqi official on the UNSCOM helicopter tried to grab the
> control and almost made the aircraft crash.
>
> When I returned to the States, I learned that the Iraqis were extremely
> nervous that we were going to inspect an unspecified nearby site, and
> that they checked that certain code named items were in their proper
> place. I knew from this information the Iraqis could only be referring
> to Jabal Makhul Presidential Site, a sprawling mountain retreat on the
> other side of the ridge from the 4th Battalion, assigned to guard the
> installation. This explained why the Iraqis caused the problems with the
> helicopter, to keep it from flying to the other side of the mountain.
>
> We inspected Jabal Makhul in September of 1997. The Iraqis locked us out
> without a word of discussion. This was the start of the Presidential
> Site imbroglio. The Iraqis made great hay out of inspectors wanting to
> look under the presidentÂ’s furniture, but this site, with its hundreds
> of acres, was the real target.
>
> During the Presidential Site inspections in Spring of 1998, inspectors
> found an under-mountain storage area at Jabal Makhul. When the
> inspectors arrived, it was filled with drums of water. The Iraqis
> claimed that they used the storage area to store rainwater. Jabal Makhul
> had the Tigris River flowing by at the bottom of the mountain, and a
> massive pump to send water to the top of the mountain, where it would
> cascade down in fountains and waterfalls in SaddamÂ’s own little
> Shangri-la, but the Iraqi had to go to the effort of digging out an
> underground bunker akin to our Cheyenne Mountain headquarters, just so
> they could store rainwater.
>
> A London Sunday Times article in 2001 by Gwynne Roberts quoted an Iraqi
> defector as stating Iraq had nuclear weapons in a heavily guarded
> installation in the Hamrin mountains. Jabal Makhul is the most heavily
> guarded location in the Hamrin mountains. With its under-mountain
> bunker, isolation, and central location, it is the perfect place to
> store a high-value asset like a nuclear weapon.
>
> On nukes, some analysts wait until there is unambiguous proof before
> stating a country has nuclear weapons. This may work in a courtroom, but
> intelligence is a different subject altogether. I believe it is more
> prudent to determine what is axiomatic given a nationÂ’s capabilities and
> intentions. There was no question that Iraq had triggering mechanisms
> for a nuke, the question was whether they had enriched enough uranium.
> Given IraqÂ’s intensive efforts to build a nuke prior to the Gulf War,
> their efforts to hide uranium enrichment material from inspectors, the
> fact that Israel had a nuke but no Arab state could claim the same, my
> first-hand knowledge of the limits of UNSCOM and IAEA capabilities, and
> Iraqi efforts to buy yellowcake uranium abroad (Joe Wilson tea parties
> notwithstanding), I believe the TWELVE years between 1991 and 2003 was
> more than enough time to produce sufficient weapons grade uranium to
> produce a nuclear weapon. Maybe I have more respect for the IraqisÂ’
> capabilities than some.
>
> FP: Tell us something you came up with while conducting
> counter-infiltration ops in Iraq.
>
> Tierney: While I was engaged in these operations in Baghdad in 2004, one
> of the local translators freely stated in his security interview that he
> worked for the purchasing department of the nuclear weapons program
> prior to and during the First Gulf War. He said that Saddam purchased
> such large quantities of precision machining equipment that he could
> give up some to inspections, or lose some to bombing, and still have
> enough for his weapons program. This translator also stated that when
> Saddam took human shields and placed some at Tarmiya Nuclear Research
> Facility, he was sent there to act as a translator. One of the security
> officers at Tarmiya told him that he had just recovered from a sickness
> he incurred while guarding technicians working in an underground
> facility nearby. The security officer stated that the technicians left
> for a break every half hour, but he stayed in the underground chamber
> all day and got sick. The security officer didnÂ’t mention what they were
> doing, but I would say uranium enrichment is the most logical pick.
>
> What, not enough smoke? There was the missile inspection on MaÂ’moun
> Establishment. I was teamed with two computer forensic specialists. A
> local technician stood by while we opened a computer and found a flight
> simulation for a missile taking off from the Iraqi desert in the same
> area used during the First Gulf War and flying west towards Israel. The
> warhead was only for 50 kilograms. By the time we understood was this
> was, the poor technician was coming apart. I will never forget meeting
> his eyes, and both of us realizing he was a dead man walking. The Iraqis
> tried to say that the computer had just been transferred from another
> facility, and that the flight simulation had not been erased from before
> the war. The documentÂ’s placement in the file manager, and the
> technicianÂ’s reaction belied this story. UNSCOMÂ’s original assessment
> was that this was for a biological warhead, but I have since seen
> reporting that make me think it was for a nuclear weapon.
>
> These are only some of the observations of one inspector. I know of
> other inspections where there were clear indicators the Iraqis were
> hiding weapons from the inspectors.

>
> FP: Ok, so where did the WMDs go?

>
> Tierney: While working counter-infiltration in Baghdad, I noticed a
> pattern among infiltrators that their cover stories would start around
> Summer or Fall of 2002. From this and other observations, I believe
> Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President BushÂ’s speech at West
> Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to prepare the younger
> generation of the security services with English so they could
> infiltrate our ranks, another was either to destroy or move WMDs to
> other countries, principally Syria. Starting in the Summer of 2002, the
> Iraqis had months to purge their files and create cover stories, such as
> the letter from Hossam Amin, head of the Iraqi outfit that monitored the
> weapons inspectors, stating after Hussein KamalÂ’s defection that the
> weapons were all destroyed in 1991.

>
> I was on the inspections that follow-up on Hussein KamalÂ’s defection,
> and Hossam said at the time that Hussein Kamal had a secret cabal that
> kept the weapons without the knowledge of the Iraqi government. It was
> pure pleasure disemboweling this cover story. Yet the consensus at DIA
> is that Iraq got rid of its weapons in 1991.

> This is truly scary. If
> true, when and where did Saddam have a change of heart?

> This is the same
> man who crowed after 9/11, then went silent after news broke that
> Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague. Did
> Saddam spend a month with Mother Theresa, or go to a mountain top in the
> HimalayaÂ’s? Those that say there were no weapons have to prove that
> Saddam had a change of heart. I await their evidence with interest.

>
> FP: So do you think the WMD is the central issue regarding Iraq?
>
> Tierney: No, and it never should have been an issue. The First Gulf War
> -- and I use this term as a convention, since this is actually all the
> same war -- was a prime example of managing war instead of waging it.
> Instead of telling Saddam to get out of Kuwait or we will push him out,
> we should have said to get out of Kuwait or we will remove him from
> power.

> As it was, we were projecting our respect for human life on
> Saddam, when actually, from his point of view, we were doing him a favor
> by killing mostly ShiÂ’ite military members who were a threat to his
> regime. I realize that Saudi Arabia, our host, did not want a change in
> government in Iraq, and they had helped us bring down the Soviet Union
> with oil price manipulation, but we should have bent them to our will
> instead of vice versa. Saddam would not have risked losing power to keep
> Kuwait, and we could have avoided this whole ordeal.

>
> We topped one mistake with another,

> expecting Saddam Hussein and the
> Baath Party, a criminal syndicate masquerading as a political party, to
> abide by any arms control agreement.

> Gun control and Arms control both
> arise from the “mankind is good” worldview. If you control the
> environment, i.e. get rid of the guns, then manÂ’s natural goodness will
> rise to the surface. I hope it is evidence after more than a decade of
> Iraqi intransigence how foolish this position is. The sobering fact is
> that if a nation feels it is in their best interest to have certain
> weapons, they are going to have them.

> Chemical weapons were critical to
> warding off hoards of Iranian fighters,

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

> The United States kept nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet
> Union, but we would deny the same logic for Iraq?

>
> There is also the practicality of weapons inspections/weapons hunts.
> After seventeen resolutions pleading with the Iraqis to be nice, the
> light bulb still didnÂ’t go off that the entire concept is fundamentally
> flawed.

> Would you like to live in a city where the police chief sent out
> resolutions to criminals to play nice, instead of taking them off the
> streets?
>
> As I said earlier, I knew the Iraqis would never cooperate,

> so the
> inspections became a matter of illustrating this non-cooperation for the
> Security Council and the rest of the world. No manipulation or
> fabrication was necessary. There was a sufficient percentage of
> defectors with accurate information to ensure that we would catch the
> Iraqis in the act.

> UNSCOM was very successfully at verifying the IraqisÂ’
> non-cooperation;

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

> the failure was in the cowardice at the Security
> Council. Maybe cowardice is too strong a word. Maybe the problem was
> giving a mission that entailed the possible use of force to an
> organization with the goal of eliminating the use of force.
>
> On the post-war weapons hunt, the arrogance and hubris of the
> intelligence community is such that they canÂ’t entertain the possibility
> that they just failed to find the weapons because the Iraqis did a good
> job cleaning up prior to their arrival.

> This reminds me of the police
> chief who announced on television plans to raid a secret drug factor on
> the outskirts of town. At the time appointed, the police, all twelve of
> them, lined up behind each other at the front door, knocked and waiting
> for the druggies to answer, as protocol required. After ten minute of
> toilet flushing and back-door slamming, somebody came to the front door
> in a bathrobe and explained he had been in the shower. The police took
> his story at face value, even though his was dry as a bone, then police
> proceeded to inspect the premises ensuring that the legal, moral ,
> ethnic, human, and animal rights, and also the national dignity, of the
> druggies was preserved. After a search, the police chief announced THERE
> WERE NO STOCKPILES of drugs at the inspected site. Anyone care to move
> to this city?
>
> FP: LetÂ’s talk a little bit more about how the WMDs disappeared.

>
> Tierney: In IraqÂ’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria
> was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate
> amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were
> other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could
> be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if
> there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never
> happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation
> with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends
> on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in
> Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land,
> you reply “I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof,
> sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.” You won’t last very
> long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in
> deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for
> an educated guess).

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

>
> The Democrats understand the difference between the two concepts, but
> have no qualms about blurring the distinction for political gain. This
> is despicable. This has brought great harm to our nationÂ’s credibility
> with our allies. A perfect example is Senator Levin waving deception by
> one single source, al-Libi, to try and convince us that this is evidence
> there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as though the entire
> argument rested on this one source. Senator Levin, and his media
> servants, think the public canÂ’t read through his duplicity. He is
> plunging a dagger into the heart of his own country.
>
> Could the assessments of IraqÂ’s weapons program been off? I am sure
> there were some marginal details that were incorrect, but on the matter
> of whether Iraq had a program, the error was not with the pre-war
> assessment, the error was with the weapons hunt.

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

>
> I could speak at length about the problems with the weapons hunt. Mr.
> Hanson has an excellent article in “The American Thinker,” and Judith
> Miller, one of the few bright lights at the New York Times, did an
> article on the problems with the weapons hunt that I can corroborate
> from other sources. But if the Iraqi Survey Group had been manned by a
> thousand James Bonds, and every prop was where it should have been, I
> doubt the result would have been much different. The whole concept of
> international arms inspections puts too much advantage with the
> inspected country. Factor in the brutality used by the Baath Party, and
> it amounts to a winning combination for our opponents.
>
> I was shocked to learn recently that members of the Iraqi Survey Group
> believed their Iraqi sources when they said they donÂ’t fear a return of
> the Baath Party. During my eight months of counterinfiltration duty, we
> had 50 local Iraqis working on our post who were murdered for
> collaborating. Of the more than 150 local employees our team identified
> as security threats, the most sophisticated infiltrators came from the
> Baath Party. This was just one post, yet the DIA believes no one was
> afraid to talk, even though scientists who were cooperating with ISG
> were murdered. You can add this to the Able Danger affair as another
> example of the deep rot inside the intelligence community.
>
> I believe that once the pertinent sources have a sense of security, a
> whole lot of people are going to have egg on their face. I believe the
> Iraqis had a WMD program, and I am not changing my story, no matter how
> many times Chris Matthews hyperventilates.

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

>
> FP: Before we go, can you briefly touch on some of the prevailing
> attitudes in the U.S. military that may hurt us?
>
> Tierney: There is a prevailing attitude that the U.S. is too big and
> ponderous to lose, so individual officers donÂ’t have to take the
> potentially career-threatening risks necessary to win. I have heard it
> said that for every one true warrior in the military, there are two to
> three self-serving, career-worshipping bureaucrats. We shouldnÂ’t be
> surprised. After all, the Army advertised “Be all you can be!” Or in
> other words, get a career at taxpayer expense.
>
> President Clinton changed the definition of the military from peace
> makers to peace keepers, and no senior officers resigned or objected.
> President Clinton took a one star general who ran a humanitarian effort
> in Northern Iraq, Shalikashvilli, and made him Chairman of the Joint
> Chiefs of Staff. The signal was out, warriors need not apply.
> Shalikashvilli later spoke at a U.N. meeting and listed the roles for
> the military in the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” He included warm
> and fuzzy things like “confidence building,” but failed to mention
> waging war. In my five years at CENTCOM headquarters, I very rarely
> heard the words, “war,” “enemy,” or “winning.” This was all absorbed
> into the wonderful term “strike operations.”
>
> Operation Desert Fox was a perfect example of the uselessness of strike
> operations. Iraqis have told me that the WMD destruction and movement
> started just after Operation Desert Fox, since after all, who would be
> so stupid as to start a bombing campaign and just stop.
>
> It was only after Saddam realized that President Clinton lacked the
> nerve for anything more than a temper-tantrum demonstration that he knew
> the doors were wide open for him to continue his weapons program. We
> didnÂ’t break his will, we didnÂ’t destroy his weapons making capability
> (The Iraqis simply moved most of the precision machinery out prior to
> the strikes, then rebuilt the buildings), but we did kill some Iraqi
> bystanders, just so President Clinton could say “something must be done,
> so I did something.”
>
> General Zinni, Commander of CENTCOM, and no other senior officer had any
> problem with this fecklessness. They apparently bought into the notion
> that wars are meant to be managed and not waged. The warriors coming
> into the military post 9/11 deserve true warriors at the top. I believe
> the house cleaning among the senior military leadership started by the
> Secretary of Defense should continue full force. If not across the
> board, then definitely in the military intelligence field.
>
> FP: Mr. Tierney it was a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you for
> visiting Frontpage.
>
> Tierney: Thank you Jamie for the opportunity to say there were weapons,
> and that we were right to invade Iraq.

> and the Iraqis knew they would
> always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear
> weapons.

>
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