Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Tapes: Saddam Had
Secret Uranium Enrichment Program
Thursday, Feb. 16,
2006
In the year 2000, two years after
Iraq expelled U.N. arms inspectors, two Iraqi scientists paid a
discreet visit to Saddam Hussein in his presidential palace.
They had come to brief the Iraqi dictator on their progress in
enriching uranium using plasma separation. If successful, their
efforts could have given Saddam the fissile material he was seeking
to make a bomb.
"You can tell that one of the scientists is nervous on the
tape," former FBI translator Bill Tierney told NewsMax. "He is
telling Saddam of all these wonderful things they can do with the
plasma process, which they initially developed in the 1980s for the
nuclear weapons program.
The scientist tried to convince Saddam to change course and use the
technology for purely peaceful purpose, but the Iraqi dictator just
listened politely. "You can imagine him nodding his head as you
listen to the tape," Tierney said.
Tierney believes the tapes will vindicate the pre-war analysis
of Iraqi WMD programs. "If anything, after translating 12 hours of
these tapes, I believe the U.S. intelligence analysis didn't go far
enough," he told NewsMax.
Tierney worked with U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq in the late
1990s, and experienced Iraq's "cheat and retreat" efforts first hand.
He will release the original Arabic tapes and English language
translations Saturday at the Intelligence Summit, a privately-funded
conference in Arlington, Va. As non-U.S.-origin materials, they are
not classified.
The plasma enrichment program was so well-protected by the
Iraqi regime that U.N. arms inspectors had never discovered it. "This
not only shows the capabilities the Iraqis had, but also the weakness
of international arms inspection," Tierney believes. "Arms inspection
regimes just don't work."
The plasma process got a brief mention in the 2004 final report
of CIA arms inspector Charles Duelfer, but only as a legacy program
the Iraqis had abandoned in the late 1980s.
Saddam's secret presidential palace tapes are the first
concrete evidence that Iraq continued clandestine uranium enrichment
work all through the 1990s, right under the noses of U.N.
inspectors.
Nothing was too small to capture the Saddam's attention, says
Tierney, "He had a special librarian in charge of taping all of his
meetings and keeping track of them, so Saddam could ask him who he
talked to about a particular subject three months earlier and find
that particular tape."
U.S. intelligence stumbled on twelve hours worth of tapes that
they asked him to translate, but Tierney believes thousands of hours
of Saddam's secret audio archive were seized during the liberation of
Iraq and could become available soon.
Tierney first went to Iraq in the late 1990s to hunt down Iraqi
weapons with the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM). "I knew Saddam was
never going to give up his weapons programs," he told NewsMax.
Former colleagues with whom he shared the tapes told him that his
suspicions just barely scratched the surface. "They found things in
these tapes I had explained in a more benign manner," Tierney
said.
Highlights from the tapes were played Wednesday night on ABC
Nightline. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Intelligence
Committee, Pete Hoekstra, has listened to some of the tapes and
declared them "authentic."
In one key exchange in April or May 1995, Saddam's son-in-law,
Hussein Kamil al-Majid, briefs the Iraqi dictator and his top
advisors on his success at concealing Iraq's Weapons of Mass
Destruction programs from UN inspectors.
"We did not reveal all that we have ... [T]hey don't
know about our work in the domain of missiles. Sir, this is my work
and I know it very well. I started it a long time ago, and it is not
easy," he said.
None of the information Iraq had provided the UNSCOM inspectors
was accurate or complete, Hussein Kamil told Saddam. "Not the type of
the weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the
volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use.
None of this was correct. They don't know any of this," he said.
Other documents Tierney plans to release include a 1993
assessment by Iraqi intelligence of foreign terrorist groups who
could attack America on Iraq's behalf, without the U.S. ever
realizing who was sponsoring them.
Copyright
2006, Kenneth R. Timmerman